MMO shooter Cinder City may be the first PC game to recommend 64 GB of RAM
With RAM prices surging to up to $1000 for 64 GB, NC’s latest game is a pricey prospect
Upcoming PC game Cinder City has become one of the first games to recommend 64 GB of RAM.
The Steam listing for the game, which is being released by South Korean publisher NC (formerly NCSoft), was recently added to the storefront.
Set in the near future in a dystopian Seoul, Cinder City is an open-world co-operative PvE game where players fight against mutated creatures.
As spotted by Wccftech, the game’s minimum and recommended system requirements are among the heaviest seen to date on Steam.
The minimum requirements for Cinder City include 32 GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 card (with 6 GB of VRAM), and an Intel Code i5-10400 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor.
The recommended requirements, however, include 64 GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 card (with 8 GB of VRAM), and an Intel Code i7-12700 or AMD Ryzen 7800X3D processor.
By comparison, recent PC releases Forza Horizon 6, 007 First Light, Death Stranding 2, Resident Evil Requiem and even the graphically intensive Crimson Desert all recommend just 16GB of RAM.
Only some of the most graphically intensive games, or those which make heavy use of GPU and CPU, recommend 32GB of RAM (including Microsoft Flight Simulator), which means Cinder City could be the first notable PC release to recommend 64 GB.
The news comes at a particularly difficult time for the memory market. According to PC Part Picker, the cost of 64 GB of RAM currently ranges from $500 to upwards $1,000, as an ongoing surge in RAM prices continues to see DDR5 and even cheaper DDR4 RAM getting increasingly more expensive.
Last month it was reported that Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron – the three largest RAM manufacturers in the world – are being sued for allegedly fixing the supply and prices of memory.
The lawsuit accuses the trio of reducing its supply of DDR3 and DDR4 RAM, leading to a sharp increase in price for consumers who use it, and focusing most of its production on HBM – a high-cost, high bandwidth form of 3D-stacked DRAM mainly used by AI datacentres instead of consumers.
As the price of memory and storage continues to rise, practically every company using these components has been increasing the price of their products accordingly. Last month Microsoft raised the prices of its Xbox consoles by between $100 and $150, while Apple also raised prices across its hardware products on the same day.
Just days before that, Valve confirmed its Steam Machine – which comes with 16 GB of RAM – would retail for over $1,000, saying its “original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable”.
